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Ami Magazine Cover Feature March 26, 2014, 66-75

Updated Webversion 7-2014

Zionism, the Grand Mufti and the Holocaust

A new book about Amin al-Husaini’s ties to the Nazis sparks a

controversy - a talk with the co-author Wolfgang G. Schwanitz

By

Rabbi Yitzchok Frankfurter

What triggered my interest in the newly-released book “Nazis, Islamists, and the Making

of the Modern Middle East,” by Barry Rubin and Wolfgang G. Schwanitz, was a Febru-

ary 3, 2014 review of it in Tablet Magazine. The provocative title read: “Did Zionism

Cause the Holocaust? A New Biography Says Yes.” That was more than enough to pique

my curiosity.

Any claim that Zionism may have even indirectly caused the Holocaust is highly inflam-

matory and subject to almost universal Jewish condemnation. Could there actually be a

scholarly work, particularly one co-authored by the late Barry Rubin, considered one of

the leading Middle East scholars of his generation, advancing such a controversial thesis?

The reviewer, David Mikics, concedes that “the authors of a new history of the Grand

Mufti Amin al-Husaini’s ties to Nazis fail to carry their logic to its flawed conclusion.”

However, he argues that “if the British hadn’t made al-Husaini Grand Mufti in 1921 in

reward for his espionage work for them, no Final Solution.

“Yes,” he continues, “you heard right. Rubin and Schwanitz make the astonishing claim

that al-Husaini is nothing less than the architect of the Final Solution. Rather than being a

garden-variety pro-Nazi, they say, the Mufti had so great an influence on the Fuehrer that

he might as well have authored Nazi Germany’s most demonic project, the mass murder

of European Jewry… They want to show that eliminationist anti-Semitism animates the

Islamic Middle East, and so they paint al-Husaini as so devilishly anti-Semitic that he can

contend with Hitler himself.”

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“Yet Rubin and Schwanitz’s claim also has serious, troubling implications. Where did

al-Husaini’s passionate hatred of Jews come from? Indisputably, from the Jewish coloni-

zation of Palestine. So, if you follow Rubin and Schwanitz’s logic—as they themselves

fail to do—Zionism is responsible for the Holocaust. No Zionist colonization of Palestine

would mean no Arab anti-Semitism, which means no al-Husaini, which means no Final

Solution.”

Mickics charges the book’s authors with gross insensitivity. “The authors use a histori-

cal life to advance their political reading of the Arab-Israeli conflict—without thinking

through the risks of loading their political agenda onto historical analysis.”

In Berlin Hitler strikes an anti-Jewish Pact of Genocide with M. Amin al-Husaini on November 28, 1941.

That night, Hitler made his Fifth Decision by ordering the Wannsee Conference for “managing the Final

Solution.” To obscure this context, he delayed news on his meeting with al-Husaini to December 9, 1941.

“That al-Husaini was a radical anti-Semite is not the real news in Nazis, Islamists, and

the Making of the Modern Middle East. We knew that already. Though al-Husaini was

put in power by Britain, he eagerly embraced Nazism and rivaled Hitler in his fanatical

anti-Semitism—and frequently proclaimed that the Middle East needed to rid itself of its

Jews. Al-Husaini spent the war years in Berlin enjoying the high life: The Nazis put him

up in luxurious fashion, with the equivalent of a $12 million a year salary. Hitler, who

admired the Mufti for his manly ardor and his ‘Aryan’ blue eyes, promised him that ex-

termination would occur in Palestine as soon as Rommel’s tanks broke through the Bri-

tish lines in Egypt and rolled into Zionist territory.”

“Al-Husaini met often with Eichmann and Himmler during his tours of occupied Po-

land, and he helped Eichmann escape to Argentina after the war. His most important

wartime mission was recruiting for the SS in Bosnia. He almost certainly visited the gas

chambers in Auschwitz, a sight that seems likely to have gladdened his heart. But for the

most part, he remained a man of vile words rather than vile deeds.”

Yet Mickics claims that these scholars went too far in blaming the Mufti for the Final

Solution.

“Where Rubin and Schwanitz depart from the known historical record is in their

dubious causal assertion that Hitler’s commitment to al-Husaini to keep Jews out of

Palestine was in turn a major motivation for the Fuehrer’s decision, sometime in 1941, to

exterminate European Jewry. It’s true, as Rubin and Schwanitz make clear, that the Mufti

advocated genocide against the Jews even before Hitler did. Like Hitler, he thought of

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Jews as subhuman and evil parasites. But the notion that al-Husaini played a key role in

Hitler’s settling on the Final Solution is based on one piece of thin hearsay evidence:

comments that the controversial Hungarian Jewish leader Rudolf Kastner attributed to

Eichmann’s subordinate Dieter Wisliceny. (Rubin and Schwanitz oddly credit the com-

ments to Eichmann himself.)”

“As Christopher Browning has argued, Hitler’s opting for genocide can much more

plausibly be traced to his exultation over what looked like a blitzschnell conquest of

Russia in midsummer 1941. The Fuehrer dropped his earlier vague notion of getting rid

of millions of Jews by shipping them ‘beyond the Urals’; in the joy of what he thought

was victory, he set about to make his new Eastern empire Judenfrei in the most direct and

terrible way imaginable.”

“Al-Husaini may not have given Hitler the idea for the Holocaust, but his actions and

words were vile enough. In his memoirs he boasted that he had prevented thousands of

Jewish children from emigrating to Palestine in 1942 and 1943 and expressed satisfaction

that they instead headed to Poland and death. The Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-

Banna lauded al-Husaini after the war: ‘What a hero, what a miracle of a man… Ger-

many and Hitler are gone, but Amin al-Husaini will continue the struggle.’”

“Yet Rubin and Schwanitz make al-Husaini responsible not only for the manifest evil

of his own words and deeds, but also for the Holocaust—and for the subsequent birth of

Israel and the entirety of the subsequent Arab-Israeli conflict. According to Rubin and

Schwanitz, Israel only became a reality through the Mufti’s rejection of the 1939 White

Paper and, later, his staunch opposition to the UN partition of Palestine in 1947. If not for

the Mufti’s powerful naysaying, they argue, Britain’s White Paper would have been

accepted by the Arabs, who would soon have ruled Palestine. This was the clear promise

of the White Paper, which would have ended Jewish emigration to Palestine after five

years. After ten years, with Arabs still in the majority, the White Paper promised a bi-na-

tional state.”

“So, without the grand Mufti, no Israel. But al-Husaini, Rubin and Schwanitz say, is

also responsible for the lack of peace between Israel and most of the Arab world. Accor-

ding to Rubin and Schwanitz, there’s a single man behind the radicalism of Middle East

politics since the 1930s, right down to the present day: The Mufti made rejectionism look

glorious, paving the way for countless Arab demagogues who trumpeted the notion that

standing up to Israel and the West is heroic, while compromise is treason. Scorning the

practical, clinging to noble but failed memories of revolt: these became dominant ideas in

Middle East politics thanks to al-Husaini.”

“Yes, the Mufti remains a source of inspiration to those who dream of annihilating

Israel and establishing a purely Muslim Middle East cleansed of Jews and Christians. But

that doesn’t mean he changed history. There is never a lack for prophets of violence in

the Arab world, or Islamists who look to the Nazis as models of proper neighborly rela-

tions with Jews and with others.”

Wolfgang G. Schwanitz: “The Mufti’s primary goal was blocking all of the

ways out of Europe. He slammed the last doors of a burning house shut.”

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I spoke to Wolfgang G. Schwanitz, a German-American Middle East historian who coau-

thored the book with Barry Rubin, to decipher all of it for me.

I understand that Barry Rubin recently passed away.

Yes, he was an accomplished scholar and a good friend. It was a great shock to me be-

cause a week earlier he was still sending me emails.

The book was just published?

It was released on February 25, 2014. Unfortunately, he didn’t live to see it. He learned

he had cancer in August 2012.

At least he lived to complete the book.

Yes, at least that much.

Isn’t it complicated for two people to write one book?

It’s not easy because different people have different experiences. But we had much in

common in our views and experiences so we had a solid base.

Barry Rubin was in Israel. You live in New Jersey. Was that a problem?

No. We met at the Middle East Forum in Philadelphia and exchanged a thousand and one

emails.

His background was different from yours. What is your specialty?

I’m a Middle East historian. My focus is the history of great power relations to the

Middle East, especially Germany and the United States. I’ve done this for three decades

at five universities and five research centers in America, the Middle East and Europe, the

“Bermuda Triangle” of global policy.

You were born in Germany?

In East Germany.

So you still recall Communist rule?

Oh yes, for two decades. Moreover, I grew up in Egypt and spent seven years of my boy-

hood there and vividly remember Abd an-Nasir’s time.

How did you get to Egypt?

My parents were diplomats from East Berlin. So they took me around. My school was on

the outskirts of Cairo, near the pyramids. I lived there through the 1967 war and I

watched Israeli jets over our area.

So you and Barry Rubin had different perspectives of the Middle East?

Very different. He was American-born and spent a great deal of his life in the US, and I

was raised behind the Berlin Wall, part of the Iron Curtain. I saw the dictatorships in the

Middle East and Europe.

Before you collaborated with Barry Rubin, did you both have similar views? Or did they

evolve in the course of your research?

My views developed over a long time. After the Berlin Wall came down, I used my time

in the Academy of Sciences to go through the records. The East Germans had a great in-

fluence on the so-called revolutionary countries—Algeria, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Ye-

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men, Egypt, Iran and Yasser Arafat’s PLO. All of the most troubled areas and organi-

zations.

For the first time I was able to look behind the scenes and research all of this. So I

published a lot on this subject. My views developed. Then, shortly after the Wall came

down, IREX, the International Research and Exchange Board [in Washington, DC], invi-

ted me to visit Middle Eastern centers of Washington DC, New York and Princeton, New

Jersey. I also participated in Congressional sessions on the Middle East. It was after the

first Gulf War in 1991. So I gained some insights into DC decision-making. I spent two

months on this journey. I also gained access to the West German and American archives.

Is the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem the central character of your new book?

No, but he plays a great role, from the Kaiser via the Caliph to Adolf Hitler. We have a

group of characters like the former Iraqi premier Rashid Ali al-Kailani, Fauzi al-Qawuqji

from Syria, and their colleagues. There were many Islamists residing in Berlin and Rome

during World War II. And we trace the story back to WWI, to the German-Ottoman jiha-

dization of Islam. Then we go on to WWII and the Cold War until the global era. The Ot-

toman leaders and then the Grand Mufti became the symbols of the German-Ottoman and

Nazi-Islamist axis that survived after 1945 and led to 9/11 in subsequent generations. To

our surprise, the global puzzle from multiple archives all fitted together like a Hollywood

picture. The dark sides were the Armenian genocide, the attempted genocide against the

Jews of Palestine, and then genocides against the Jews, Slavs and others during WWII.

Most people view Islamists as a footnote in the Holocaust. You say it’s more than that.

Yes. Islamism and Nazism developed in parallel. At certain points they converged. We

trace it back, researching sources in two dozen archives that were never used before. We

followed new facts and evidence as they became accessible. This was also a result of the

German re-unification. Germany had been divided for 45 years; so were its archives. On-

ly after the unification in 1990 were we able to dive into history with full speed and put

the parts of the puzzle together. Plus, there was a simultaneous push in the United States

to uncover the secrets of the Second World War and the Cold War, such as the Nazi War

Crime Disclosure Act in Congress [in 1998, I used it for my book on the German Orient

Bank]. It has only been in recent years that we were able to access CIA reports dating

from WWII until 1974 about the Grand Mufti. We discovered how he and his aides, also

former Nazis and Islamists, cooperated with each other. So it’s still an ongoing process.

Hitler despised Semites.

No. That’s wrong. First of all, in the recent sense, there was no group of “Semites.”

That’s an invention of the Jew-haters. They made up the term shortly before 1900 and

called themselves “anti-Semites.” Before then, it was just a family of languages. There

were no tribes that called themselves “Semites.” These are traditional, Biblical terms, in-

appropriate in the era of nationalism.

So Hitler hated Jews but had no problem with other Semitic groups like the Arabs?

As I said, there were no “Semitic” groups, only languages. Hitler respected Arabs. He

looked at their achievements in history, religion, architecture and agriculture. We have

records in which he tells stories about the Arabs and their jihad. He read all the books by

Karl May on adventures in those lands.

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But they aren’t “Aryans.” He had no problem with that?

He had no problem with the Turks, Arabs, Iranians, Kurds—all of them. He had a roman-

tic view of them simply derived from reading. He never traveled beyond Europe. Hitler

regarded al-Husaini as someone with Roman ancestors. His physician said he was a Cau-

casian with his blue eyes and red hair. Hitler also believed in relying on regional allies. In

“Mein Kampf” of 1925 he explained that if you look for power-sharing, you need stable

regional forces to depend on. He didn’t look to colonize; he looked for locals who would

do the job for him there.

Is it your thesis that the Grand Mufti and others were instrumental in influencing Germa-

ny to exterminate the Jews?

They played a role; they were not the main people responsible, which were Hitler’s

Nazis. That’s undisputable. But they had joint goals, for instance, stopping any Jewish

emigration to the Middle East to prevent an Israeli state. After 1922 it was the only place

where a Jewish national homeland could legally be established. Until 1941, even during

the war, legal Jewish emigration from Nazi Germany to the Middle East was possible

[see also document 3.1, page 9]. Half a million Jews did it. The Grand Mufti’s primary

goal was blocking all of the ways out of Europe. He slammed the last doors of a burning

house shut. In the beginning of 1941 he asked Hitler in writing to stop Jewish emigration

from Europe to the Middle East. In turn, Hitler promised to deal with the Jews in the

Middle East the same way he did in Europe.

On November 28, 1941 they made a deal. They concluded a pact of genocide, first ver-

bally, and then in April/May of 1942 in writing, see below. Hitler wanted to eliminate all

of the Jews in Europe, the Middle East and globally in three steps. He would also ask

every non-European nation to deal with the “Jewish problem.” This was agreed to in a

one-and-a-half-hour talk. Hitler told the Mufti, “As soon as my army reaches the Cauca-

sus, Iran and Iraq, I will continue to march further; you are the man for the Mideast.” It

was agreed between the two of them that the Jews of the Mideast had to be liquidated.

Italy and Iraq joined in the atrocity.

Doc.1: Secret letter, April 28, 1942, al-Husaini, al-Kailani to Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop [same to his

Italian colleague Ciano] asking “to agree to the liquidation of the Jewish national home in Palestine.” [=the

Jews]. They did. The four signatories hoped also to reach Iraq and Iran via the Caucasus [see book, p. 134].

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In this way, the Mufti was instrumental in implementing Hitler’s vision in the Middle

East. We found files in the archives of the former Soviet Union, interrogation protocols

of Fritz Grobba, the Nazi diplomat to the region, in which he told the Communist interro-

gators in 1946, “Yes. Hitler and his foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop planned to

evacuate all of the Jews of Palestine and the region to liquidate them.”

Tablet Magazine claims that your book says that Zionism caused the Holocaust. Do you

in fact say that?

No. It was not the finest hour of their reviewer, who teaches English and not Middle Eas-

tern history. To me, it’s unimaginable to say that. On the contrary, Zionists rescued a lot

of Jews before and during both World Wars. We also write about the attempted genocide

against the Jews of Palestine from 1915 to 1917. Persecution and pogroms were long on

the table both in the Middle East and globally. Theodor Herzl started Zionism to stop it,

initially as a German-Austrian-Polish-Russian and British project.

Tablet Magazine also says you make the astonishing claim that al-Husaini was nothing

less than the architect of the Final Solution.

No. The architect of the Final Solution was Hitler. His ministers of death were Hein-

rich Himmler and Adolf Eichmann, who closely cooperated with the Grand Mufti. I

found six meetings between them during the process of the Holocaust [as recorded in my

German book, p. 319]. Al-Husaini visited various places where Nazis rounded up Jews,

like Budapest, see below.

Source: US National Archives II, Record Group 242, Captured Enemy Property

Doc. 2: German Foreign Ministry, cable from Budapest to Berlin about Amin al-Husaini’s predicted arrival

in two days in Budapest on October 7, 1944, by knowledge of Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.

Six men were expected in al-Husaini’s entourage. German SS envoy to Hungary Edmund Veesenmayer

asked what al-Husaini would do, if this was a political mission and which language to use. SS officer Otto

Winkelmann requested that the envoy take care of him and his men. Al-Husaini was to meet 60 imams of

the 13th

Muslim SS Division, who briefly gathered near Budapest, to boost their moral—for “2.000 soldiers

deserted to Josip B. Tito’s partisans” as it was reported to Berlin on 10/5/1944. Eberhard Ritter reveals in

his handwriting that von Ribbentrop (“RAM”) and SS officer Anton Brunner, also known as one of Adolf

Eichmann’s aides in hunting Hungarian Jews, were informed on al-Husaini’s travel. Jews were being roun-

ded up. Eichmann’s commandos drove them to places of the railroad with Auschwitz death camps as goal.

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Why did Eichmann deny those meetings during his trial in Jerusalem?

He said he met the Grand Mufti once, just briefly.

Why did he downplay it?

Hitler did the same. At first he concealed his meeting with the Grand Mufti on November

28, 1941 in Berlin. He only made it public ten days later, after the Nazis had to postpone

the original Wannsee Conference from December 9 to January 20. This broke the link

between their meeting and the start of the Wannsee preparations for the Holocaust. No-

body discovered it again until now. There might have been another reason: to “protect”

each other. After 1945 there was always a “danger” that al-Husaini would be brought to

justice as he deserved. He was an accomplice to the Holocaust. Although he encouraged

the Nazis to kill the Jews he was never “the main architect.” But there is no doubt that

he would have done the same if Hitler had won. He started the Farhud pogrom in Bagh-

dad in mid-1941 and called the Muslims to jihad a year later to kill the Jews just as Erwin

Rommel’s troops reached Egypt.

How much influence did he have on Hitler, if at all?

He held some sway over him. We have many files corroborating this. Hitler was never

outside of Europe, so he was clueless about the Middle East. All he had was a romantic

view derived from literature. He even once said, “You don’t need to travel to the Middle

East to guide the armies there because you can read the literature.” But of course, he had

a lot of questions. There were four secret meetings between Hitler and al-Husaini. Simon

Wiesenthal always said they met several times, and he was right. We previously only

knew about one of them, [the official one] in late 1941.

So what do you think was his actual influence on Hitler?

The invitations to the Wannsee Conference went out on the very next day after their ver-

bal genocide pact. The Wannsee Conference, of course, laid the [“logistical”] foundations

for the Holocaust. So this is very tangible. That’s number one.

Number two, at that point Hitler had the impression that the war against Russia was

basically won. His units had reached Rostov. Erwin Rommel was on the march in North

Africa. Where next to focus? On November 29, 1941, he told the Italian Foreign Mini-

ster Ciano, “Now we are turning to the Middle East.” He needed aides there. Only the

Mufti and guys like Rashid Ali al-Kailani in Iraq were able muster troops and help the

German army when they would invade.

Hitler issued two orders to ready the Middle East as the next great theater of war, ex-

pressing his desire to rely upon the “revolutionary movements of the Middle East.” And

he clearly meant al-Husaini and his Islamists, al-Kailani and his nationalists, and all the

others. If Hitler had succeeded [winning the war], he would have had many people gree-

ting him when his army entered the Middle East, among them the Grand Mufti’s men.

Number three: The Mufti had a deal with Hitler to liquidate Jews of Palestine. There

are identical letters between Hitler’s and Mussolini’s foreign ministers, the Iraqi Prime

Minister Rashid Ali al-Kailani—see here page six, doc. 1—and the Grand Mufti. And it

was always their intention to eliminate the national homeland of the Jews in Palestine, the

Jews there. Later they extended it to all the Jews of the Middle East, about half a million.

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After this, the Mufti watched what was going on. He visited the places where Jews

were being rounded up and sent to the death camps [as shown for example in Budapest

with document 2 on page 7]. And he himself visited the death camps.

Was he responsible for any of the exterminations?

Yes. He discusses it in his memoirs. They only came out in Arabic 1999 in Damascus,

compiled by a man who had served as his secretary [Abd al-Karim al-Umar] for many

years. Al-Husaini admits almost everything. He even says, “I was accused of promoting

the Holocaust, for instance, that 400,000 [Hungarian] Jews were sent to death camps.”

(documents 6-7, p. 13). Some people wanted to kidnap him, bring him to trial. He himself

discusses this. He was proud that his interventions with Hitler, Himmler and other Nazis

were successful. Whenever he heard that Jews had escaped or that the Nazis were willing

to exchange them for prisoners, he intervened and got them to close the escape routes in

Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania and elsewhere. “I was successful,” he notes proudly.

How did he wield power in Europe?

By giving advice to Hitler and Himmler. In one letter to Himmler he wrote, “I heard an

exchange is being planned of 10,000 Jewish children for prisoners.” We know that this

SS leader promised him not to release Jews to Palestine, the Mideast. We have records of

Eichmann’s aides saying the same. Under Nazi rule this meant almost certain death.

But what was his involvement in the actual extermination of Jews? How much blame can

we assign him?

He was a close accomplice of Hitler in the liquidation. From 1939 until 1941 Hitler was

unsure of what to do with the Jews; even for him it only developed step by step. When he

invaded the Soviet Union, it represented a whole new area to exterminate, and the Grand

Mufti would do the same in the Middle East. While he wasn’t the main architect of the

Holocaust, he was a close co-conspirator. His SS units in the Balkans were infamous for

killing Jews. A lot of this is starting to come out as new documentation is discovered.

Doc. 3.1: US Sergeant Marvin L. Rissinger captured SS officer Dieter Wisliceny on May 3, 1945, who was

Adolf Eichmann’s aide. Lieutenant Kurt Sichel debriefed him from August 25 to 27 producing four pro-

tocols on the Holocaust. Protocol of 8/27 clarifies that Hitler put SS chief Heinrich Himmler in charge of

Jews. Eichmann was his subordinate. In 1940 and 1941 Jews, also thousands Jews from Danzig, emigrated

to Palestine, their legally sanctioned home by the League of Nations. This changed on November 28, 1941.

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Doc. 3.2: The murder of Jews started after the Nazi invasion into Soviet Russia in mid-1941. They were

either executed there with the advance of troops by Himmler’s commandos “as partisans.” Or they were

deported to Eastern Europe for mass executions after arrival, or in the death camps of Poland and Russia

for which Hitler gave in early 1942 a “special order” for the complete destruction of all Jews. When PW

[prisoner of war, Dieter Wisliceny] asked Eichmann in August 1942 who gave such an order, he told him it

was “the special order of the Fuehrer” [Hitler]. Eichmann also disclosed to the PW a letter of Himmler who

ordered the “finish of the Jewish question,” Endlösung der Judenfrage: “this tarn-word had the meaning of

killing of all Jews.” My German book has the full protocol with its early picture of the genocide, page 211.

And you think al-Husaini’s advice was important?

Very much. According to a 1937 agreement, he paved the way for Nazism in the Middle

East through his networks and propaganda. His men mustered troops in the Balkans and

Soviet Union—Muslim SS troops. It was very important to Hitler to have additional for-

ces. The longer the war dragged out, the more important the Grand Mufti became to him.

He was his watchdog. He had a close network of men working for him. And he made the

plans for a “Jew-free greater Arab Empire.” Plus, he incited hatred in North Africa.

So when Hitler was waffling on what to do with the Jews from 1939-41, the Mufti stepped

in and influenced him to go with the Final Solution?

It wasn’t that simple. It also had to do with what was going on in the rest of Europe and

America. But the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was valued for his influence over Muslims,

having promised to mobilize troops if the Germans invaded. The Mufti was Hitler’s go-to

man for creating a Nazi-style Mideast. We bring proof in the book, in 30 pictures and

documents. Their high point of cooperation was in the first half of 1942, when they

thought that the final victory was so close.

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You said that Islamists and Nazis had certain things in common. What were they?

Al-Husaini propagated these concepts in writing. He said that the Muslim world had no

greater friend than Hitler and Nazi Germany. The Nazis trusted him so much that they

boasted to him of having already killed three million Jews in 1943. He mentions this in

his memoir. He was so intimately involved that Himmler told him about his nuclear

weapons research.

Doc. 4: On page 126 of his 1999 Damascus memoirs, al-Husaini reveals Himmler’s remarks of

having “up to now liquidated about three million of them” [Jews]. The talk occurred in summer of 1943.

The Mufti mentioned other commonalities: In the same way that Islam considers all Mus-

lims a single community, the umma, so too did the Nazis consider the German people a

single entity. Jihad is one of Islam’s main duties. Muslims see jihad and martyrdom as a

crown, and the Nazis also stressed struggle, battle and self-sacrifice. Islam puts the

community of believers first; the Nazi Party’s motto was against “Jewish materialism.”

Both the Grand Mufti and the Nazis were in agreement that the public good comes before

the private good. In Islam, children must obey their father and motherhood is revered.

The Nazis felt the same. Both ideologies oppose the Jews. As al-Husaini repeatedly em-

phasized, the al-Qur’an enjoins Muslims to stop tolerating Jews, urging them to drive

them out, wage battle against them and kill them. There is also a common reverence for

labor. An Allied victory would have been a triumph for Jews and a disaster for Muslims,

it had to be prevented. All of this was his stump speech for motivating Muslim soldiers.

Is Islamic hatred directed towards Jews or Zionism, or is it the same?

It’s a long story that began with the early Muslim community and the different views on

the struggle against the Jewish communities in Arabia. It also has to do with the concept

of modernity. Does it threaten us? Will we lose our holy traditions? The Jews were pretty

much in the same situation as all minorities in the Middle East. Their survival was often

threatened. And they lived among people who struggled with social and modernity issues.

What about the struggle over the land?

Of course that played an important role but it also depends on political vision. In the

beginning the Zionists hoped to cooperate with the Arabs. The other role of the Grand

Mufti was to block any liberal or democratic advances by the British, as well as to ad-

vance the Nazi option for the Middle East [November 24, 1937, in my German book on

page 413]. In many ways he surpassed the Nazis in hatred and virulence. He called for

ridding all the Islamic lands of the Jews in mid-1937, even before Hitler did in his realm.

Do you think the Nazi hatred was a Christian hatred?

It wasn’t a single reason; it was a complex of many. Of course, one would be the struggle

between Christianity and Judaism right from the beginning.

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So it was a Christian-Muslim alliance against Jews?

They saw themselves as like-minded. Nazis didn’t see themselves as Christian people.

Hitler hated Christianity. He was happy to have “crushed” Christianity in Europe. He said

that in a speech. The Nazis didn’t regard themselves in religious terms. But Hitler and the

Nazis appreciated Islamists. They had a certain similar ideology and the Nazis liked the

concept of jihad very much.

Do you think that WWII would have been different without the Islamists?

Yes, in a way. The main perpetrators remain Hitler and company. But in order to

establish an international “pyramid of power” he needed like-minded people. From 1939-

41, the Nazis toyed with the idea of evacuating the Jews to Madagascar [see document

3.2, page 10], as Hitler opposed a Jewish state in Palestine. He had broken with the for-

mer German policy of encouraging their emigration to Palestine under Kaiser Wilhelm II.

And that was because of the Grand Mufti?

I wouldn’t go that far. But al-Husaini was a key voice in the concert of accomplices.

There are reports by leading Nazis that he influenced Hitler and Himmler to kill the Jews.

Source: US National Archives II, Record Group 226, Office of Strategic Services

Doc. 5: U.S. spy services watched the Grand Mufti Amin al-Husaini in the Mideast and Europe. Above are

reports from 1945. A Cable, Berne, 5/17/45: “According to higher officers of SS, order for the destruct-

tion of Jews was given out by Hitler, but collaboration of subject [Amin al-Husaini] is discernable.”

I don’t like to exaggerate his role because Hitler had already advanced the idea of gassing

the Jews—“tens of thousands of their agitators”—in “Mein Kampf” of 1925. Hitler clear-

ly had his vision. The Mufti studied his book, the first Arabic (it was the first foreign lan-

guage) edition came in a 1933 press serial, and therewith al-Husaini realized his vision.

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Source: US National Archives II, Record Group 226, Office of Strategic Services

Doc. 6: This text illuminates findings about [“M.”] Amin al-Husaini. In mid-1944 this text shows that Bu-

dapest recognized al-Husaini’s request of stopping Hungarian Jews from going to Palestine with “the

utmost consideration.” In his Damascus memoirs of 1999, p. 128, he declared the “success” of his letters to

Hitler, Himmler and von Ribbentrop preventing Jewish travel to the Mideast. Still, this didn’t make him

the “architect of the Holocaust,” as some people allege. But he lent the Nazis a helping hand and admit-

ted this fact openly. He forged a connection with Hitler’s Nazis, thus between Islamism and Nazism. His

hope was that Berlin would win that war and reorder, according to his advice, the Middle East Nazi style.

Doc. 7: In 1944, notes al-Husaini in his memoirs as mentioned above, “the world Jewry wanted to bring the

Eastern European Jews to Palestine—as they try today to bring them from Russia, the Balkans and Eastern

Europe to the occupied Palestine [written about 1968, WGS]. Germany agreed to this. But we fought this

attempt and wrote to von Ribbentrop, Himmler and Hitler, and then to the governments of Italy, Hungary,

Rumania, Bulgaria, Turkey and others. We were able to foil this effort. This caused the Jews to put ugly

blame on me of being responsible for the liquidation of 400,000 Jews who were then not able to travel to

Palestine. The Jews demanded to try me in Nuremberg as a war criminal (a matter to which I will come

back to on another occasion in this memoir by some photocopies of those exchanged letters).” Al-Husaini

rightly stressed that Nazis even agreed to let some Jews go in 1944, an “escape” which he was able to foil.

The number of “400,000” Jews he referred to was then the known number of Hungarian Jews. Half of them

perished in Auschwitz death camps. The Jewish genocide was one of the biggest crimes in the 20th

century.

How much influence do you think the Nazis had on Islamists?

They had a huge influence. Germany was greatly admired because it didn’t have colonies

in the Mideast. This was a plus for Berlin. Then they brought all kinds of economic pro-

jects along with them like the Baghdad railroad, not to mention German-made products.

Germany had united only relatively recently, in 1871, and some Arabs yearned to emu-

late them. After Paris fell, in mid-1940, Europe was under Hitler’s thumb and they admi-

red that. There were some who rejected Nazism, fought with Allies. But not a majority.

For sure we wouldn’t have had Israel without the Holocaust.

This is wrong. The League of Nations proposed rebuilding a national Jewish homeland in

Palestine in 1922. As we reveal in the book, the Kaiser pressed Istanbul for an “Ottoman

Balfour Declaration,” and they issued one in mid-1918, welcoming a Jewish home in Pa-

lestine through immigration and colonization. Of course, the Ottoman Empire came to an

end soon. But there were many seeds for the State of Israel, including Theodor Herzl. The

Holocaust was an additional factor, and likely a big one. But it wasn’t the only one.

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But we definitely have a different Middle East because of Nazism?

Very much so. If you read the book, you can see how the radical factions got the upper

hand.

And Nazism still influences the region till today.

Yes. Let’s use colors: There was a black influence; the Kaiser’s [radical right wing Jew-

hating circles of] Christianity was represented by the color black. Then came the brown

[racist warfare] influence of the German Nazis. In 1945, after the Nazis were finished in

Europe, some fled to the Mideast and turned to Islamists; so a Nazi element survived in a

strain of Islamism. Plus, when Islamism was revived in the early 1970s, it was tinged by

the red color—a [left wing extreme tied to class warfare] Soviet sway on radical states.

After 1990 many leftists turned to Islamists. The influence of those “ideological colors,”

black, brown and red, has existed in the Middle East for the past century, but was not

deeply delegitimized. From 1919 to 1945, Italian fascists in black shirts played their role.

The Mideast was always under the sway of three totalitarian strains. Its leaders adopted

from those strains the fitting mosaics to suppress the people and moved on parallel tracks.

How do you view the Islamization of Europe?

I am in sorrow over it. There are a lot of “green dots”—Islamist-ruled neighborhoods that

are no-go zones. It’s also a problem for liberal Muslims all over the world when Islamists

cooperate with jihadists in the Middle East. On the other hand, I have much hope that the

Europeans know how to get a good integration going and how to de-jihadize, especially

young men. All of Eastern Europe has had to turn around since 1990 and shed their old

ideologies of hatred against groups or democracies [and so should others, like Islamists].

Do you think the Sunni-Shiite divide will rupture soon?

It’s an ancient, major rift. The divide came about shortly after the advent of Islam. But it

wasn’t a problem for the Grand Mufti. He cooperated very closely with Iranians against a

common enemy. There are also people in Tehran today who have no problem with sup-

porting Sunni jihadists in Syria and in Iraq. Islamism is a very flexible movement and

ideology in many respects.

Sum up the basic message of your book.

The book exposes the German-Ottoman alliance in WWI, Berlin’s discovery of Islamism

as a tool in world politics, and the use of Muslim brotherhoods as platforms for jihadism.

Many times, the same people who served as young soldiers in WWI went on to become

commanders with the same genocidal ideologies in WWII. They had previously seen ge-

nocide against Armenians and an attempted genocide against Jews of Palestine in WWI.

In the Middle East, Nazism and Islamism continued to be legitimate, so many of their

networks continued to exist and resurfaced in the 1970s. On this basis, the next genera-

tions under Usama Bin Ladin prepared for 9/11, and some even managed to wrest power

in the “Arab and Islamist Spring.” In Cairo it lasted a year. I can only hope that the Egyp-

tians don’t opt for another type of dictatorship. Time will tell.

See book Nazis, Islamists and the Making of the Modern Middle East: Yale, February 25, 2014, 360 pp. In

German: Islam in Europe, Revolts in the Middle East, available June 10, 2013: book in Berlin, order here. Reprinted by permission of Ami Magazine. Updated on July 20, 2014. Links, photos and seven documents were added.